An Alicorn in Ponyville

Moon, rocks and gravy

I had many adventures chasing the purple streaked tail: I would hold out my hoof to it and the purple streaked tail would recoil; I would trot forward and the purple streaked tail would recede. You get the picture. They weren't very fulfilling adventures. There was no 'tail lifting' or 'tail nomming' or tail interaction that wasn't tinged with the subtle melancholy of separation. Eventually I decided to stop chasing tail. That was when I noticed a strange flapping noise, feeling of vertigo, and the slight whistling of wind through my strangely rigid ears. I appear to be airborne. I try to look around but my eye-lids feel too heavy to move, so that all I see is blackness. In fact the whole of me feels heavy and.. solid. Not uncomfortable though.

"NNNNGGG So... heavy!"  I hear the tomcoltish friend of 'Twilight' say from above.

"Oh yes.. I'm sorry. I'll pull harder." I hear the soft voiced one say from near the first voice.

"You wouldn't think... that she'd weigh... so much..." the tomcoltish one continues between pants. "Thighs like... a silver birch stripling - supple and elegant like... like..." she pants and pauses. (I can sympathise - reaching for a metaphor while flying is a pain in the flank.) "...like the legs of a grand piano." (Not a terrible attempt, but a bit flat. I vaguely wonder what she would have come up with if she were grounded.)

"Wow Dashie... still practicing for that fan fic you're writing?"

"Oh! Uh... no... um Fluttershy.. something else. Err... it's for an 'experiment'."

"That's right girls! Take it to the Everfree forest!" the familiar voice of 'Twilight' drifts up from somewhere below me, cutting through the awkward conversation of the airborne duo.

Another voice I recognise comes into hearing, sounding like it is continuing a conversation. "He sort of IS a changelingamagingly thingly because he CHANGED... but mayyybe he isn't like one of the insecty changlingingalingly thinglies. He seems more... pony somehow... I felt it in my tail!" the nonsense and high pitched tones of the bouncy mare 'Pink' assailed my solid ears from somewhere near Twily.

"Pink, I'm not a changeling! Tell your friends that, and while you're at it could you open my eyes and itch my snout." I fail to say, my mouth suffering from the inertia and rigidity of the rest of my body.

"Pinkie! I need your Pinkie sense to make.. well.. sense for once! What do you mean!?" 'Twilight' continues the conversation from below, sadly without my input.

A familiar snorting noise "Silly! I mean that even if he's a changelinginging he's a pony too! He isn't MEAN!"

"But why? How? Have you got any proof? She must be a Changeling like Crysalis if she's changed shape to become an alicorn! That's what a changeling is! There are no OTHER changelings-"

"That you know of darling." the distracted tones of the elegant white wingless pony drift up from below and behind me.

The purple pony mutters something in response.

"And ah've been round town. There's no changelings Twi." the cowpony joins in.

More muttering.

"Come on Twi. T'aint right.. an we gotta tell Celestia."

"NO! If she finds out I turned her sister to stone she'll banish me to... I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT SHE'LL BANISH ME TO FOR DOING THAT!"

The other voices mutter something almost in unison - it sounds like spoon.

"And if ya don't Twi? Don't ya think ya kinda makin this worse?"

"GAH! Fine! Rainbow, drop her!"

After a second the flapping seems to stop and I get a terrible feeling of vertigo.

"Dangnabbit Rainbow be careful! You might hurt her!" the cowpony warns.

I accept the conversation passively. It seems like the thing to do at the moment.

--

It's π life

The air around me feels.. magicky again, and I feel 'friendshippy' again...

And then I feel other things again - like the cool breeze through my fur and feathers, and the sun on my forehead.

I stretch. This is a bit of surprise in itself, since for what feels like ages I've been immobile. I risk trying to open my eyes, and, unlike the risks associated with professional gambling syndicates, this risk pays off as they finally open!

"Now look ere Missy... just who ARE you?"

"Yeah!" most of the others chorus, with varying degrees of intent.

"Yeah!" the white one says, late, regarding me (or more accurately my flank) with an abstracted expression.

"Why my name is L-"

"We know that, EL! But are you..." she pauses impressively "here to take over.. Equestria!" she stands defiantly in front of me, purple streaked mane fluttering a little in the convenient wind.

I pause to take the effect in, but avoid leering; instead I nobly address myself to the content of her speech. "Didn't ponies do that already?" I begin, academically. "Well I mean they didn't take over Equestria... the buffalo weren't technically possessing the land in any bureaucratically recognised sense, so you wouldn't describe it as a classic case of deprivation of ownership, as that concept ultimately stems from sovereignty! Although I know this is a somewhat unpopular perspective these days I feel..." Why do I get the feeling that the dream mares are giving me a bad review?

"Could she be a sort of female discord? The spirit of nonsense?" 'Twilight' opines.

The other 'ponies' look uncertain.

"Sugarcube, what we mean to say is..." (is 'sugarcube' southern? It sounds right but also not somehow.) "...are you Celestia's sister?"

"Oh well I'm glad you asked, because I really would prefer it if the dream stay away from uh.. sisters and mothers and such. My Dad is called John, my Mother is called Sarah. They are boring and old and my feelings towards them are entirely well adjusted. I have one older sister who I love in a dull, mundane and unpsychological way... someponies might think I was jealous of her for being the first born, but allow me to prove them wrong! You see you might say she's been a bit more successful than me, and I accept that she lives her life well, but it's her life! I wouldn't want it anymore than anypony else's!" I ramble on to the dream mares about my surprisingly normal family relationships. Their expressions vary markedly.. The pink one nods along seriously. The white one looks at me like she's contemplating some sort of differential equation where flank = 2 π. The yellow one looks sympathetic. The purple, orange and cyan ones are looking at me as if I was mad. "But I can't say I've made even the acquaintance of somepony as grandly named as 'Celestia'." I finish.

"Twah... she talks a bit like Discord alright... 'bout as much sense as Granny Smith makes after drinking zap apple cider, but don't yah get the feeling she's about as dangerous as... as..."  there's an uneasy silence as the mare grasps for a suitable southernism "...an uh.. granny smith apple."

The bad attempt carves another awkward silence out of the group.

"You're..." the attractive purple pony pauses, then looks defeated, her snout pointing to the perfect grassy ground. "You're right! Nothing dangerous could be so silly!"

--

The purple mare regards me uncertainly. "Girls... do you mind if I spend some time alone with EL?"

FINALLY! Oh God please PLEEASE don't let me wake up yet!

Through a rose tinted haze I hear the other 'ponies' assent and retreat.

She approaches deferentially, and, rearing up, places a cautious hoof against my neck fur. "Who ARE you?" her innocent pale purple eyes gaze up into mine - it takes everything in me not to lower my snout to hers - but I want to prolong the moment, and the dream, and so I restrain myself. "I am Leonard and-"

I stop as the mare looks perplexed. She stares deep into my eyes, as if reading me. "Len... nard..." she says the name as if she were judging its quality based on criterion stemming from a naming tradition based around glitter "And why are you here. Len... nard."

This perplexes me. It's not often in a dream that you get the 'why' question. For a moment I wonder if I'm not dreaming, but I think you'll agree with me that ever since talking with Pink everything has had a dream-like quality to it.  "To make... friends?" I say after a while. For some reason I feel guilty, as if I might secretly really be a changeling somehow.

"But... how do you expect me to believe that! You just randomly show up at my home with Pinkie, and you're an ALICORN, a PONY GOD!?" she's upping the volume again.

"Look." I say slowly. "I'm just a normal pony. I have wings. I have a horn. I have four legs. I have a tail. I have needs-" I say hopefully, trying to get the conversation back on track.

"Err Miss? Hate to break it to you but normal ponies don't have wings or horns."

"YOU ALREADY DID THAT. GET OOON WITH IT!" Pink says from somewhere.

Twilight ignores her, as do I, because something far more important has only just dawned. "It is Mr by the way. Mister Leonard. I'm a stallion and proud. Yup. Stallion." You might find that unduly definite - an almost cocky assertion of gender - a kind of primal rawr of masculinity. But you know buck you! I AM a guy, and I've never had any weird thoughts about it, so it stands to reason that my gender shouldn't just be casually disregarded in my dreams. Also, if you were standing next to a gorgeous vulnerable, wanting mare (I'm free to do that in my dreams also btw) you are especially irked at being called 'Miss' - it's profoundly emasculating.

Twilight groans. "You're about as much help in identifying yourself as.. as... Pinkie's wretched lizard! You are a winged unicorn mare with proportions akin to a fully grown Princess!"

'Princess' is somehow more emasculating than 'mare'. I begin to wonder if waking up now would be the thing, but I reflect that if I woke up now I might remember that at the height of my lust for a delicate nubile (if wingless) mare I get rebuffed and called a princess. Would my colthood ever survive such a memory? No I would need to see this through.

--

The art of the cross-dresser

The small purple mare snorts "Come with ME!"

I sigh with relief that the dream has moved on from the awkwardness.

"We're going home!" the mare blows a stray piece of mane out her eyes and clops along.

I notice that the other ponies, 'her friends,' are looking at us uneasily. I get a sudden feeling that they might start clicking their hooves Equestria-side story style and follow us, but fortunately they don't.

However, the white one does trot toward me. "Here... it's not much, but I thought it might help her blend in." the elegant white pony produces an entirely non-descript utilitartian piece of fabric for covering my wings, not unlike the picnic blanket which Pinkie had produced, just a little more comfortable. So stop looking at me like that. She's obviously a down to earth and forward thinking sort of pony who would do that. A business-pony. Also... WHOSE DREAM IS THIS ANYWAY! If you're imagining me in a quickly thrown together but remarkably overdesigned satin dress that is entirely due to your perverse imagination.

Anyway having established that my masculinity is in tact I think we can move on.

"Rarity, it's so beautiful." the yellow one says approvingly.

"Thank you dear - oh it's just a little thing I threw together. I had to! It's not everyday you get to design something for a princess!" she says, radiating modesty.

"How can you 'just throw together' something as lacey as that? She looks like she's going to the Gala!" the cyan one says half irritably, half amusedly.

The orange one just snorts. "Bang up job Rarity... couldn't ya just have made something simple like ya did for Twa's birthday?"

"It's very... nice, but SHE IS NOT! GAH! Girls! You're not being helpful!" Twilight snaps irritably

"Yeah! And he looks ridiculous!!" 'Pink' opines.

As gollum would say: 'I'm not listening'.

--

Bronyville

Thinking hard about hoofball, beer and sexy mares in saddles, I trot beside my purple companion. ("She'd take a size 8 I reckon bruv" I say to myself "Naah, sexy flank like that'd take a 6 hur hur. Caw imagine err in stirrups." ... "Caw bruv.. cawww." Yeah well I've never felt the need to really be a red-blooded stallion before... as if you could do much better in the situation.).

We head back through the rural idyll of the deformed diminutive dwarves. I notice many an amazed glance. I really wish the.. uh.. oversized shirt didn't have quite such a long shirt-train, as the dwarf-ponies keep on picking it up. Soon I acquire three foals trotting along self importantly with the uh shirt-hem in their mouths. I turn back round quickly - eyes staring determinedly ahead. This. Isn't. Happening. In. My. Dream.

I put up with the intrigued glances. I put up with the growing audience of cooing mares. I don't put up with the growing audience of stallions... admiring my uh stallionniness. "Twily" I hiss to her - the word 'Twilight' isn't about to pass my lips, it's too bucking absurd "could we speed things along a bit."

She groans "Yeah... wait a moment will ya.." her hot horn (in both senses ;3) lights up again, and I feel her magic grab me and 'crinkle' me. I open my eyes to see her slump, exhaustedly, onto a chair, back in the tree/house book-room where I first met her.

Much better.

--

A surprising amount of High School biology

The first thing I do is remove the ludicrous oversized 'shirt'. Or at least I would if it hadn't been fastened on. I've never worn a shirt with straps before. The mare looks at me bemusedly as my magic looks to untuck and untie the 'shirt'. She finally gets off the stool, practically wobbling with fatigue "Enjoying... your... dress? Or is it... not up... to your... standards 'princess'?" she wheezes sarcastically, doing quotation hooves. Well at least she doesn't seem to agree with the 'princess' description, perhaps soon we can work past the 'mare' description as well?

I smile at her uncertainly and stop trying to remove the restrictive 'shirt'.

"My... friends... might... buy your lame-flank story..." she continues, gradually getting her breath "...but I don't! I NEED PROOF!" her horn lights up and she drags me towards, and down, a set of stairs  (bouncing and sliding on my hooves) into another book-room. Did I mention I quite like 'strong mares'? Not in a sissy way, but I really find it adds some spice  to a relationship... Will you stop giving me that look ok? Who's more of a stallion? The guy who conquers some soft spoken helpless submissive or the one who bends a snorting, raging career oriented mare to his will?

Conveniently by the end of that self conscious [and rather sexist ~ ed.] little narrative I reached the bottom of the stairs. She trots on determinedly, dragging me to the middle of a much larger bookish room.

"STAY THERE! If you so much as move your horn, so help me Celestia I'll give you a moustache so large it'll take weeks to shave off!" Classic transformation magic, oh my sweet talented darling.

She trots into another room, and shuts the door. I look around a bit, but find nothing worthy of description. I mean there's lots of stuff to say about the inside of books, but not a great deal to say about their outside, even en masse. You see I'm actually perfectly happy with the current trend of putting books on a Kindle, as 'holding a book in hoof' just isn't a priority for me compared to avoiding having a load of boring and quite space consuming items obscuring the walls. Anyway other than the quantity of books (a difficult thing to be interesting about) there is not much else I think I can say about this room. I could be 'funny' and say there was a quantity of shelves too I suppose. Oh there is one thing - you know I said that this place was a tree/house - well this room reflects the tree-ish nature of the overall construction, by being circular. A point I might make about building houses inside trees (if for some reason you're still reading this ridiculous paragraph) is that the structure of a tree is in fact provided by its central xylem tissue which dies and hardens leaving a dead lignin structure behind it. Twily's tree is presumably either synthetic or magical since it clearly isn't relying on principles of structural bio-engineering to stand up. Incidentally what sort of middle class faux pas would it be to live inside an artificial tree?

I hear much banging from the room the mare disappeared into. "SPIIIIIIKE SPIIIIIIKE! WHERE DID I PUT MY X-RAY? YOU KNOW THE ONE I USED ON FLUTTERSHY'S PET DOE WHO'D SOMEHOW BROKEN ITS CUTE FWUFFY TAIL."

The green lizard rushes through the room, headed towards the other room. We exchange a sympathetic glance before he rushes off. I like this lizard.

"Uh I dunno Twilight..." mutter mutter (there is a dooor in the way you know, my perky pony ears can't hear everything for you) "What about Owlicious' nest?" {...OH TO THE DOUBLE-YOU- ELLE EYE-CEE-EYE-OH-YOU [beat] ESS. THERE AIN'T NO X-RAY [beat] IN OWEL-ICIOUS-ES NEST, JUST OWLICIOUS. The narrator butts in, singing to a funkay beat. 'Who's the narrator?' you say. Buck knows. On with the story.} "HOW ABOUT IN THE CUPBOARD WITH THE PINK FLUFFY HANDLE THAT SAYS 'PRIVATE'" 'Spike's' voice continues,

"NO! NOT THERE GET AWAY FROM IT EEEEEH!" she shouts, and then screams in a fillyish way. I find it pretty hot.

"Oh wait! I FOUND IT! UNDER THE BOX WHICH IS LABELED 'NARRATIVE CONVENIENCE'"

Mutter mutter. Bang mutter bang. Mutter. If I were a bad writer I'd just copy and paste those lines for a while, because there was in fact quite a bit of banging and muttering, presumably while they set that up. I sat still fidgeting in my oversized shirt while they did this. I may even have drifted off because I next remember seeing Spike beckoning me with a claw and saying "If you would trot this way Miss; Twilight is ready to see you now."

--

Gratuitous Clop

I clop into the room. The door shuts behind me.

'Twilight' isn't sitting next to the x-ray with a mini-skirt and open necked nurse's uniform. As a logical result of this absence the miniskirt doesn't reveal her to be wearing cotton panties. Similarly by logical necessity the non-existent panties do not highlight the roundness of the diminutive mare's perfect hemispheres, nor do they give an impression of the wanting softness that nestles hidden between the mare's supple purple thighs.

Instead of these marvelous possibilities she is looking at me irritably, sweating heavily (giving off quite a strong and unpleasant scent) and gesturing for me to step towards a large and rather crude looking metal apparatus.

Not one to disobey such a gesture I trot towards it.

"Lets see these 'wings' of yours." she says sarcastically.

Still unable to entirely remove the shirt, I instead contrive to push one of my wings through it. I don't know if you have wings, but basically it's like having an extra set of fore-legs that are sort of curved in on themselves. The protruding bit of a wing is in effect  the 'elbow'. The reason I mention this is because trying to push your wing through a shirt is like wearing a shirt with your elbows in the sleeves, and that position is really really hard to get out of. That explains why all I managed to achieve was ruffling my wings about and stomping around like a filly who couldn't get out of her prom dress.

Twilight remained silent throughout this episode. Obviously she isn't into physical comedy. The lizard, however, seemed very amused. "Hahaha that has.. gotta be... the goofiest 'princess'.. I've ever... seen!" I hear him say through bouts of hicupping, bellyish laughter.

"Spike, kindly take this clown's wing out of her dress." I hear a bored and irritable sounding mare say.

"Will do Twi." I feel the lizard mount me. That's not a sentence I ever expected to say. Anyway, I don't know how it is for non-ponies but being mounted is basically not something any respectable stallion  allows to happen willy nilly. There is but one response: I had to buck him. I was hampered by the clothing of course, but I think I did a fair job, because I soon felt him dismount me. At least if the term 'dismount' extends to flying through the air and crashing into a large pile of books.

Either between the bucking or the lizard's efforts the shirt seems to shift off my wing a bit, and it finally extends.

"Good enough!" the purple mare says, and I feel her magic pull the shirt off my eyes and pull my finally dislodged left-wing out.

I see the lizard rise from a pile of books, his eyes rolling comically. I shoot him an apologetic glance which isn't returned.

"Now we'll see, con-mare, if your wing stands up to scrutiny." she rubs her hooves and grinds her teeth in a rather disturbing way.

She pulls my wing roughly against two blocks of metal attached by a forest of wires to a contraption (which, as the mare's magic touches it, begins to hum). Again I return to my passive state - I'm a fairly tolerant sort of colt when treated right.

The machine hums away, as does the mare, whose eyes are glued to a monitor on the machine. She gradually moves my wing over the length of the metal thingies (machines aren't my thing) tutting irritably the whole while.

After a while she says "Other wing." rather abruptly. For a moment I fear a repeat of the farce with my left wing, but am spared repetition by the agile claws of the green flanged lizard, who had approached my other side. "Already there Twilight!"

I poke my right wing from the opening and it gets the same treatment.

The next bit takes a long time. Far. Too. Long. I mean I'm a fan of scientific rigor, and I love benefiting from science! Where would I be without computers? Where would I be without synthetic medicines or fabrics? But lets face it- bits of science are bucking dull. Anyway this mare checks, re-checks, writes up the results, hypothesizes, negative hypothesises blah blah blah science blah. She doesn't let up an inch though. Anyway after what seemed like days, but which was probably merely a long working day (the lizard gave me some sort of hay-based drink and I caught a bit of sleep standing on my hooves) she finally stops.

"This..." she wheezes "...is.... not... possible!" her voice gradually gains in volume "...EITHER I'M WRONG OR YOU ARE AN ALICORN... BUT YOU'RE NOT! AND IF MACHINES CAN'T PROVE THAT YOU AREN'T! THEN FRIENDSHIP WILL!"

But does that mean what I think it means?

End of Part II